Sara Blakely, Founder of Spanx
Sara Blakely is one of those individuals who have turned their failures into their today’s glamorous success. She is considered one of the top American businesswomen and philanthropists. The founder of the Spanks, an intimate apparel company that she founded in 2000 with her life savings of $5000, is currently worth a billion.
On February 27, 1971, Sara was born in Florida to Ellen and John Blakely. She completed her high school from Clearwater High School and attended Florida State University. From a very young age, she dreamt of being a lawyer just like her father, but due to being a terrible test taker, she failed in her LSAT twice. Realizing that being an attorney was not her journey, she decided to look in a different direction. She auditioned for the part of Goofy in the Disney world but was not selected due to her height. Eventually, she secured a role as the chipmunk. Later in her life, she started selling fax machines, going door to door without any leads or sales lists. Many times she would face people calling police on her or the door on her face. During her tough times, she never gave up hope. After a few years of selling fax machines, she understood she was good at sales and wanted to create a journey of her own story with her own product. Wearing pantyhose during this Florida heat, she would hate how those pantyhose would look and feel on her toes. Most of the time she would get creative and cut the feet off of her pantyhose. One of those days she wore a pantyhose with the cut feet and white pants, which made her figure more pleasing. This was a boost of confidence for Sara. Here, she saw her opportunity. Sara had a product idea: a pantyhose with a cut off toes, but it had some issues, such as the cut-off area would roll up and make it more uncomfortable. She had to now work on making her product a better product. In the year 1998, she moved to Atlanta and decided to invest the $5000 of her hard money that she was saving in researching and developing her ideal product made of hosiery. She would travel to various hosiery mills to pitch her idea, and every time she would be turned away. Later on, she received a call from a mill manager in Asheboro, North Carolina, who informed her that he would offer his support after he received a positive push from his daughters. This made her realize that this industry was actually being run by solely men. Finally, the prototype was created during this time that year. She wrote her own patent and company legal structure to save some money. Initially, she named the company spanks because she felt the name to be quite quirky later on; she changed to Spanx, and for $150, she trademarked Spanx.
With all these hardships, she was able to grab the go-ahead from Neiman Marcus Group CEO Karen Katz and was able to sell her product from seven of the stores. Even though she had her own start-up, she was still working in Danka. This was one of the busiest periods of our lives, where she would work her regular job and later in the night stuff would spank into envelopes and mail them to the customers. During the first year, she made $4 million.
After a year, Sara sent Oprah Winfrey a box full of her products for her Winfrey television program. In November, Oprah added spanks as one of her favorites in 2000, which led to the huge popularity of spanks. This allowed Sara to resign from her job. This created a massive boost in the sales of Spanx. She was able to make $10 million in sales. She also appeared on QVC. During that time, she was able to sell more than 800 units in under six minutes. She had become a young billionaire by 2012.
Sara celebrated her failures, just like her father. During her childhood, her father would encourage her and her brother to talk about their failures and celebrate their efforts. Today, she is following her dad by encouraging her children to talk about failures and celebrating their efforts. Sara landed a spot on The Rebel Billionaire, a show created by the famous billionaire Richard Branson, where she proved herself to be a very savvy young entrepreneur. She was so impressive in the show that Branson gave her a check for $750,000 for her charitable foundation called The Sara Blakely Foundation. Her foundation focuses on empowering women towards becoming entrepreneurs. She is considered one of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people. She partly owns the Atlanta Hawks, a professional basketball team.
Her journey teaches us to never give up and to learn from failure. Now, she has become an inspiration for millions of young entrepreneurs due to her massive success.
